March is Women’s History Month, and the GFWC Seward Woman’s Club heard a presentation March 12 about some of the women who helped shape Seward County.
“All the women on the prairie are great women,” Pat Coldiron said. “They had to live by themselves. It was not often they’d get to town. It was a hard life.”
Coldiron, a local historian, talked about a handful of women who were important to the county’s history, starting with Mary Moffitt. She and her husband Lewis owned the land that became the center of Seward.
When they realized it was time for the county to have a courthouse, they sold the land for $1 to a group that made it into the courthouse square.
“They put the good and love of community above themselves,” Coldiron said.
Clara Hackworth, another early settler, shared her memories with William Smith at the newspaper.
“She has a baby sister buried in Iowa,” Coldiron said.
People came to Nebraska, which opened for settlement July 4, 1854, for a variety of reasons. Many were Civil War veterans, Coldiron said. A group from Wisconsin came because speculators convinced them to.
“They had an image of a beautiful prairie,” Coldiron said. “They came over the hill to burned ground. But they had the courage and perseverance to carry on.”
In the late 1800s, Elizabeth Langworthy helped organize the Seward Woman’s Club. She was the first secretary of the Nebraska Federation of Women’s Clubs and the state president in 1899.
Langworth was one of the first delegates to Omaha in 1894, Jean Kolterman, a longtime woman’s club member, added.
The original meetings were held in the Windsor Hotel, Coldiron said.
Langworthy’s son Bill married Jessie Tishue, who loved the arts and “was determined to give their fortune back to Seward,” Coldiron said.
Through the Langworthy trust, the city built the civic center and helped fund the hospital.
“Her generosity of spirit was an inspiriation to the rest of the state,” Coldiron said.
Dorothea Bek came to Seward from Arcadia in 1941. She married Paul Bek, and both were excellent photographers, Coldiron said. Paul was a lawyer, so Dorothea learned a lot about the law. He died in 1959.
Dorothea and her friend Willa Koenig took trips together after that. In one, they went around the world in 70 days.
“They contributed to a wide understanding of the culture around them,” Coldiron said.
The two women lived near each other and put a rope between their homes “so they had something to hang on to as they walked back and forth,” Coldiron said.
After Koenig died, Bek continued to work at the school library before retiring, when she then ran for school board.
Kolterman said Bek taught Latin and Spanish when Kolterman was in high school.
Koenig’s sister Clara put a book together in 1941 with stories about their relatives, including their uncle, George Willer, one of the founders of Concordia University.
More recently, Coldiron said, Lucile Duerr represented Seward in the business world. Duerr owned seven businesses by the time she died, including beauty shops and a wiglet store. She owned the School of Beauty in Lincoln and a shop in Omaha.
“She represented Nebraska in Paris at a cosmetology show,” Coldiron said.
Julena Stineheider Duncombe hailed from Goehner. While she didn’t directly impact the county, she impacted the world.
After teaching for several years, she moved to Washington, D.C., in 1945 to work for the U.S. Naval Observatory. In 1948, she and her husband Raynod moved to Yale University, where they introduced punched card equipment into the astronomy department.
She went back to the Navy in 1940 and worked in the Nautical Almanac Office. During her time, the punchcard system allowed her to produce tables with positions of celestial bodies for navigation. The system also helped discover errors to the star catalogs, which were corrected.
Duncombe was also responsible for maps and predictions of solar and lunar eclipses.
